Winning the PLM game!
Operating principles
They say software is eating the world...
We say it can still be tamed. With years of experience dealing with the creature, Senticore can plan and execute projects from conception to reality.
- It’s often easy to point a finger at what is wrong, but much more difficult to identify the root cause and create a vision for change.
- Our methodology is founded in the “Capabilities-based planning” framework, closely aligning with project and domain-specific Agile methods.
- We make sure that your software is designed properly, priced accurately, planned, built, delivered and deployed with the highest quality.
Here is our blueprint for a successful project:
Our partners:
Our services
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Humans create software applications that operate on top of hardware devices, consume data and produce data for other applications or immediately for the humans.
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We are focusing on enterprise applications in the Aerospace and Defence, Automotive and Industrials, especially PLM, MES and the rest of the engineering ecosystem. We have a particular strong expertise in the Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE, PTC Windchill, iBASET Solumina and their respective universes.
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We are experienced in both software development and consulting, including assisting OEMs and their suppliers with requirements analysis, technology review, vendor selection, acquisition and actual implementations, for on-premise, on-cloud and hybrid infrastructure.
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Every engineering environment has its own stacks of software. 4IR tzunami is presently shaking all foundations of the engineering world, and those adapting too slow may not survive the great wave.
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DevSecOps best practices can dramatically improve engineering systems operations and directly and positively affect the company bottom line. While DevOps focus is on speed and agility, DevSecOps naturally weaves pieces and layers of security throughout the software development life cycle.
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Senticore understands engineering domain and DevSecOps equally well and we will help you to surf that big wave confidently. We’ve got you covered with sophisticated CI/CD pipelines, containerization, automated testing, code security and ITAR related processes.
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Companies acquire or develop internally a variety of systems for different purposes: PLM, ERP, MES and all kinds of analytical and reporting systems, then adding supplier integrations to the mix. These systems can stay isolated in their dreaded data silos or they can be integrated to ensure efficient distribution of information.
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Integrations can be implemented by many direct bridges between systems, or by so-called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) framework. While ESBs are more sophisticated and initially more expensive to implement than direct integrations, they offer strategic advantages further down the road in terms of scalability, security and cost of maintenance.
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Senticore is highly experienced implementing Enterprise Service Bus technologies, connecting all pieces of the engineering and manufacturing ecosystem in a truly sustainable manner.
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A slow software system antagonizes users, disrupts business processes and directly damages the company bottom line. Good application performance is often better than a large amount of features.
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Senticore expertise in performance and scalability resides on our profound understanding of all levels of application stacks: databases, application servers, clients and networking. When addressing performance concerns we dissect each component and data flows between different components, leaving no stone unturned unless we identify the problem and either provide an immediate solution or we help communicating to a particular vendor a comprehensive change request.
Case study
Business Challenge
A major industrial OEM experienced cost and security issues in its supplier bid management process
- A separate named license was required for each vendor. Since number of vendors varied over time, the license cost was escalating.
- Vendors were allowed certain access to the PLM system located inside firewall.
Senticore approach
Implementing an AWS-based supplier collaboration portal in combination with PLM proxy system
- Separating supplier data exchange from the PLM system
- PLM system was connected to the supplier data exchange portal via a custom secure proxy server
- AWS based supplier portal used S3 and other features to guarantee highly scalable and secure access for vendors
Outcome
Major reduction in costs combined with improved company security posture
- Security and compliance concerns were entirely eliminated
- Licensing costs were brought to a predictable low value
Case study
Business Challenge
A major OEM’s engineering environment operations were regularly hindered by legacy practices
- Engineering applications heavy footprint was making every change very expensive to implement
- Application UI required a lot of manual testing; still a lot of bugs were falling through the cracks
- Collaboration between various teams was complicated, causing delays and cost overruns
Senticore approach
Use modern CI/CD methods, including pipelines, containers, automated testing and code scanning
- Fitting a fully-functional PLM environment into Docker containers
- Selenium for automating smoke and regression testing, with log analysis and video recording
- Azure DevOps, Maven and Ansible for automating the processes
Outcome
Direct positive impact on the company bottom line
- Collaboration between various stakeholders became significantly more efficient and transparent
- Operations of the engineering environment started moving at the pace of relevance
- Overall, better quality, faster deployment and reduced costs allowed engineering systems to support business much better
Case study
Business Challenge
Over the years, a major OEM created many 1-to-1 bridges between different systems to exchange data
- Adding a new system required creating new Bridges
- Older technologies created performance bottlenecks
- Complicated and expensive maintenance
Solution approach
Enterprise Service Bus for exchanging data between various systems in a standard way
- Apache Camel as a foundation
- Custom adapters for specific systems
- Standard JSON-based payload
Business Benefits
Standard data format simplified integrations. A dedicated message bus took care of transporting messages in a standard way. Scalability issues resolved entirely
Case study
Business Challenge
A major aerospace and defence OEM needed unified business intelligence and reporting across all its engineering systems
- PLM, ERP, MES and other systems had different access methods and different formats, which made combining, analysing and presenting that data complicated and expensive
Solution approach
Сentralised DWH system
- Centralized high-performance database to aggregate all data from various engineering systems
- Custom ultra-fast mass-data exporters for each source system
- Built-in analytical functionality, star transformations and other techniques
Business Benefits
- Low-maintenance & high-performance architecture
- Fast access to unified data views and reporting
Case study
Business Challenge
A major OEM experienced serious difficulties maintaining aircraft models designed in 1990-2000s in a legacy CATIA V4 format
- Huge plotters required to create drawings
- Physical Media had to be regularly replenished
- Creating Plot Files can be a manual effort
- Physical media storage took increasingly more space with diminishing value
- Sometimes it is necessary to plot and send physical media across the world.
- Maintaining legacy hardware/software dependencies was increasingly expensive and non-secure
Solution approach
High performance secure file conversion to PDF
- High-performance service architecture to allow massive processing
- Custom solution with vector-based transformations using open-source libraries as a foundation
- Validation method to demonstrate quality compliance and adherence to the government regulations
Business Benefits
- Major savings from no longer using legacy processes in terms of people and equipment
- Savings from eliminating need to store paper versions of the legacy engineering designs
- Increased company’s customers satisfaction due to faster ECR processing